SCaLE 7 Speed-through

Now in its seventh year, it's hard to believe the Southern California Linux
Expo (SCaLE) started off as a grouping of Southern California LUGfests.
Regular readers of LG may remember that Ben and I first attended two years ago,
mentioned in a series of writeups, in issue 136. Our
now 18-month old son, Michael,
attended for the second time as well, while his sibling-to-come upheld
family tradition by attending his or her first Linux convention in
utero. Some of the big names in Open Source attend this convention,
and the organizers have really applied every lesson they've learned along
the way to make this a smoothly-run success.

In contrast to the long lines reported at SCaLE 5, the organizers switched
to self-check-in, which cut delays substantially. The check-in printout
included a raffle ticket for the Saturday evening reception and a
personalized Web address for speaker surveys. The convention schedule was
well-designed and easy to read. Signs made what could have been "hard to
find" rooms merely a long walk.

There were signs of economic slowdown everywhere. Freebies were barely in
evidence, and most of those were inexpensive - distro CDs, pens, and
stickers. Some of the very few memorable ones were the ubiquitous flashing
FreeBSD felt devil horns on a headband, O'Reilly's selection of buttons,
and the ZenOSS squishy zebra. Michael's favorite was the collapsible
frisbee in a pouch from Bytware; his Mommy and Daddy really appreciated
that, too, as one of the best child-safe and attention-holding gimmes ever!
The convention itself gave away eco-friendly lightweight canvas totes
instead of T-shirts - a smart move away from the usual plastic or paper
bags.

The free WiFi available in many parts of the convention was maddeningly
slow. (Another unfortunate victim of budgetary constraints - truly adequate
bandwidth would have been prohibitively expensive, and efforts at more
creative solutions were stymied by lack of line-of-sight to appropriate
relay stations). The Westin itself is a T-mobile hotspot, so anyone
inclined to pay was probably well-served.

Friday started the weekend off with a full schedule:

What was once the "medical track" at SCaLE has become its own one-day
conference (Demonstrating Open-Source Healthcare Solutions - DOHCS). Ben and I didn't sit in on any
seminars, but it looked like it was well-attended and well-regarded by the
professionals it was designed for.

Fedora and ZenOSS had free-form tracks on Friday, respectively as "Activity
Day" and "Community Day", while Subversion opted for a series of organized
panels for their Community Day track. Sun had Solaris workstations set up
in the room that became the "Try It Lab" for the rest of the weekend; this
was a hands-on area with multiple workstations and a facilitator for trying
out everything from Ruby to Moodle to OpenOffice - a very nice opportunity
for anyone who wanted to get a little actual experience.

I stopped by one of the last panels in the Women in Open Source track on
Friday, after ignoring the room with the mysterious label "WIOS". I wish
they had opted for the complete expanded title instead. The OSSIE (Open
Source in Education) track was also very well attended - they managed to
fill an auditorium. This is the track that Ben regrets missing the most,
since education has always been near and dear to his heart; perhaps we'll
catch it in a future SCaLE.

Other multi-slot programming included BSD certification exams, the Ubuntu
Bug Jam, and the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA)
running four half-day classes for sysadmins as SCaLE University. The
convention had its usual excellent spread of classes for all experience levels
from utter beginner to pro, with some big name speakers at all levels. Ben
and I didn't get to as many panels as we'd have liked, but we had a great
time over all. We did a lot of tag-team babyminding, and some fellow
attendees (and some staffers) entertained Michael as well. Many of the
presenters shared their information at the SCaLE Web site, and I will
definitely be following up on the ones I wish I'd seen. I wish I'd gotten
to participate in "Growing up Free", and hope that SCaLE expands that
concept along with the ubiquitous OLPC machines to a parent/child track
(especially if they incorporated childcare or child-friendly panels).

The "Weakest Geek Theatre" (actually, a panel-style game show with
contestants voting each other off for bad answers) was a lot of fun.
Topics ranged from the obvious to the obscure, and Randal Schwartz
was on hand to act as arbiter for the Perl questions. Contestants started
to use "Al Gore!" (who, as we all know, didn't invent the
Internet), as their favorite way of saying, "bleeped if I know the answer
to that!", and I'm highly tempted take that on, myself. Midway through,
someone announced the availability of FREE! beer in the back. Cue stampede
for free beer.

As far as the venue itself, the Westin LAX's elevators were horribly slow,
but that, of course, is out of SCaLE's control - and there were signs
promising faster service (after renovation) coming soon. The front desk
staff was extremely gracious and helpful.

We met some LG alums - sorry to say I don't remember your names, having
been slightly distracted by the energetic explorations of Michael
throughout the weekend. Please do remind me! We learned about some great
open source software - a few games we had overlooked until now, and some
projects we hope to showcase in the coming issues.

For anyone at any level of Linux expertise, SCaLE is a great "bang for your
buck" gathering and one we look forward to attending again.

Kat likes to tell people she's one of the youngest people to have learned
to program using punchcards on a mainframe (back in '83); but the truth is
that since then, despite many hours in front of various computer screens,
she's a computer user rather than a computer programmer.

Her transition away from other OSes started with the design of a
massively multilingual wedding invitation.

When away from the keyboard, her hands have been found wielding of knitting
needles, various pens, henna, red-hot welding tools, upholsterer's shears,
and a pneumatic scaler. More often these days, she's occupied with managing
her latest project.